American Spy

American Spy is written as a letter to the narrator's (Marie) twin sons as she prepares to go after the CIA officer who ordered a hit on her. Marie is a black woman who grew up in Queens in the 1970's and worked for the FBI in the ‘80's. The main action of the book takes place in the mid-‘80's, Cold War times, when Marie is recruited to “get close to” Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso, and get information from him. There are several layers of deception to this recruitment which peel away as the story progresses and plans go off the rails.

As plans go off the rails, you start to wonder if it's happening because the people in the story are actually really bad spies, or if Lauren Wilkinson doesn't know enough about the work of spying to write a believable spy novel. Also, the character Marie has a great deal of confidence in her abilities, which is not always justified in her actions. If it's part of the story that she's actually not a very good spy even though she thinks she is, that's one thing. If it's just a poorly imagined spy story, that's another.

What this novel does well is show the parallels between the life of a spy and the life of a black woman in a white world. Marie is always assessing peoples' truthfulness, intentions toward her, their motivations, and she instinctively understands the need to guard her real identity, her own truthfulness, level of intelligence, and motivations. These things come easily to her, it seems, because she has done them all her life. Her father, a Vietnam veteran, became a policeman after the war, much to their community's puzzlement, and Marie's motivation for joining the FBI is also questioned. The complexity of Marie and her father's (and sister Helene's) loyalty to a country and authority structure that does not seem loyal to them is another major theme in this book, and is more compelling than the not-totally-convincing spy novel that is the vehicle.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this novel.